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"At Fukushima, Ice Is Just Another Brick in the Wall of Denial"

"Japan will attempt to staunch the massive amounts of contaminated groundwater flowing into the sea from the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex with a giant wall of ice.

Japan’s Nuclear Regulatory Agency, the government oversight body created after the ongoing Fukushima crisis revealed previous official watchdogs to be ineffective, has signed off on construction of a network of pipes, pumps and compressors designed to freeze the ground and create a mile-long “ice wall” to block the path of water flowing between surrounding mountains and the Pacific Ocean.

The plan, adapted from procedures used to dig tunnels near waterways, has been discussed for over a year. No ground-freezing project of this size has ever been attempted, and there is no real sense of how well it would work."